"This train is a jiggle box.. a thing possessed of nervous demons, an epileptic taxi, a passenger elephant with flat feet & a peg leg." - Trained Wreck Welcome to Jigglebox.com, the epileptic taxi of my wild mind, a name born of a writing-frenzied insomniac x-country rail journey in 1997. Here is the living library of one writer's life, everything: A to Z. From Atypical prose to Poetic journalism to gonZo mad-hatter Rambling Rants. The five links above are seldom updated, as I am a writer, not a webmaster, though I continue to code this site myself, by hand. The real treasure trove of this site is its Rants, my fingerprint-unique style of writing similar to Gonzo but not the same. Click HERE to read about & order yourself a copy of the happy result of a decade-long spell of non-publication finally broken, my first published book Dead Men Hike No Trails. I've been banging my head on this cyberwall since long before blogs were blogs, and it's all here. So join me for a ride down The Rabbit Hole, a labyrinth of over half a million words of hope, tears, laughter, love, introspection & inspiration. Enjoy! - Lord Duke Here's the latest! Punishment, Pacific Crest Trail Style     In my mind tonight I return to a place in my last book, a quaint little one room schoolhouse on the Appalachian Trail of which I made mention in Dead Men Hike No Trails. In that story, on that hike, someone had written repeatedly in punished-pupil style on the blackboard, "I will not hike the AT naked." I'm back in that schoolhouse tonight, chalk in hand. The blackboard has been erased, awaits a new pledge. I begin to write, filling the board from left to right with the same sentence repeated again and again. I move down a line and continue. When the entire blackboard is full, I put down the chalk and walk out, take the hand of my partner, my lover, my friend, lift her from where she sits against a tree, help her on with her pack, don my own, and together we set off down the trail. Back in the schoolhouse, the board now proclaims, one hundred times repeated, "I will not hike the PCT, the CDT or the AT alone ever again." I hiked some 900 miles from the Mexican Border to Yosemite this spring and summer before fleeing the record-high snowpack of the Sierra Nevada and the overwhelming solitude of the trail on July 6th. I am hard at work on a sequel of sorts, to my last book. I dream of publishing it this year. We'll see. I AM SOOOO NOT HIKING TO CANADA. To read of my hike and bits of the new book, click here: I dare do all that may become a man. Write Me! Rick McKinney 1999-2010 All Rights Reserved